An Evening with Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes made his only public appearance of the year on Thursday night, at the Institute of Technology and Engineering, an imposing red brick building overlooking the Thames. Barnes, who won the Booker Prize this year, had agreed to discuss his new novel “The Sense of An Ending” with the critic and biographer Hermione Lee, in order to raise money for the charity Freedom From Torture, of which he is a patron. Barnes was wearing a grey suit, a white shirt, and black shoes that looked comfortable. He began with a typically English entreaty to conversation: “Right, Hermione.”

The conversation, like the book, was about memory: its reliability, the way it changes over time, its potential for manipulation and exploitation. Lee asked Barnes to read the first and second paragraphs of the book aloud. Barnes did so, and then admitted that he had initially written a different beginning. He said, “The original first sentence was, ‘His name was Adrian Thorne.’” In the book, the character’s name is Adrian Finn. Adrian Thorne, Barnes said, was the name of a real person he had gone to school with, and so he had lifted a substitute surname from Steve Finn, the British cricketer. “Sportsmen are often quite useful for names,” Barnes said.

Barnes never starts with characters. “I start with a situation, a moral error, and then I ask who it happens to.” He described books as animals, with a structural exoskeleton—“You have the idea of head, body, tail”—and mushier insides that the author must fill in. For “The Sense of an Ending,” he’d originally envisioned a book with a long body and short head—“a 3:1 ratio of set-up to pay-off”—but, in the course of writing, the body had shortened and the head had lengthened.

The germ of the book was a series of e-mails he exchanged with his brother, Jonathan Barnes, a professor of ancient Greek philosophy. Julian had written to Jonathan in an attempt to excavate details of their shared history such as how their grandfather killed chickens. Jonathan had replied, “I don’t think much of memory as a guide to the past.” Over several years, Julian considered his brother’s point-of-view, and ending up writing a book about time and the tendency of humans, as time accumulates, to narrate our lives into shapes that the primary sources, were we ever to consult them, might belie. Barnes said, of Finn, “He wants a sense of corroboration, and he discovers that as his life goes on the witnesses diminish.”

For me, the most haunting (and masterful) part of the book was a passage in which the narrator contemplates the distinction between guilt and remorse, concluding that remorse is guilt that cannot be redeemed:

And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse…Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made. Even so, forty years on, I sent Veronica an email apologizing for my letter.

Barnes spoke about this. His voice was soft and measured. “Guilt is something you can work your way out of with sensible thinking—a psychiatrist, someone forgiving you. Remorse is beyond that. It’s something kind of curdled.”

The subject changed back to exoskeletons.

“So this armadillo,” Barnes said. “It has this exoskeleton which you decide…. Then there’s what I call the internal skeleton, except it’s more like gristle—something between bone and muscle.”

“Marrow?” Lee ventured.

“Cartilage!” a member of the audience called out.

“It’s cartilage,” Barnes said. “That’s it. Thank you.”

After a series of questions from the audience about some bits of the plot that they found puzzling but that Barnes clearly did not, Lee asked Barnes whether the book was meant to be desolating, in the manner of Flaubert, or whether perhaps something about it was secretly consoling and buoyant, in the manner of George Sand. Barnes exacted his revenge with the utmost politesse. “In my next novel, everyone’s memory is going to be reliable, no one’s going to get old, no one’s going to die, and, if they do die, they’re going to go to heaven,” he said. What I really wanted to know was how his grandfather killed chickens.

Photograph by Ellen Warner.

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.